The new Will & Grace trailer is everything we hoped for and more

The first look trailer for the upcoming Will & Grace reboot has landed, and it’s got us seriously excited for what’s in store. The NBC sitcom about two gay men and two straight women living in Manhattan was always one of our favourite Nineties TV shows: often extremely silly, it also offered a sweet, sour and genuinely touching depiction of a four-way friendship.

As with any beloved TV show, there’s always a fear that a revival will fall short of the original – or try too hard to ‘modernise’ it, thus losing the essence of what we loved in the first place. But if the Will & Grace teaser trailer is anything to go by, we don’t have anything to worry about.

The cast are all back together in New York, and they look almost exactly the same. Will (Eric McCormack) is still tanned and serious, Grace (Debra Messing) still has amazing hair and a slightly manic aura, and Jack and Karen (Sean Hayes and Megan Mullally) are still rude, fabulous and hilarious.

Blessedly, the show’s producers have decided to totally ignore the events of the controversial eighth season finale, which saw Will and Grace having a huge argument and losing touch for years. The episode then featured a flash-forward, in which the former best friends reunited when their children met at college.

That major plotline has been totally scrapped for the ninth season, and – give or take the odd contemporary reference – you’d be forgiven for thinking that nothing has changed for Will and Grace at all. We see Karen dancing ecstatically while listening to Fox News on her headphones, Jack throwing a strop because Brangelina divorced on the day of his own break-up, and Will and Grace playing Heads Up! on an iPhone, but apart from that, it’s very much business as usual.

“We spent most of our time trying to figure out what would be the way to make the show the best version of itself coming back after 11 years,” Max Mutchnick, the show’s executive producer and creator, told Entertainment Weekly.

“That finale really caused us a lot of grief. You write a finale because a show is over. You never think that it’s coming back again.”

Megan Mullally, Eric McCormack, Debra Messing and Sean Hayes on the Will & Grace set in 1998.

Mutchnick’s co-creator and executive producer, David Kohan, added: “When the decision was made to bring the series back, we were like, ‘Well, we left them with kids, right? And if they have children, then it has to be about them being parents, ’cause presumably it would be a priority in their lives. And if it wasn’t a priority in their lives, then they’re still parents, they’re just bad parents, right?’”

“We frankly did not want to see them being either good parents or bad parents,” Kohan continued. “We wanted them to be Will and Grace.”

Speaking as herself in the new trailer, Messing says that the cast’s goal in rebooting Will & Grace was simply to make “everybody laugh as hard as we did before, or more”. We think they should be able to pull that off.

Will & Grace will return to NBC in the US on 28 September. Details are yet to be confirmed about when it will be aired in the UK, but we’ll keep you updated.

Images: Chris Haston/NBCU Photo Bank / Rex Features

Topics

Share this article

Author

Moya Crockett

Moya is Women's Editor at stylist.co.uk, where she is currently overseeing the Visible Women campaign. Carrying a tiny bottle of hot sauce on her person at all times is one of the many traits she shares with both Beyoncé and Hillary Clinton.